We held our breath and listened. A far-off howl sounded above the dull humming of the jungle. Perhaps some dog was baying at the faint face of the moon. Or possibly it was the roar of some beast roaming about in search of prey. “Tigers abound,” the Englishman had said. So must snakes in the undergrowth of this damp spot. A crackling of twigs close beside me sent an electric shock along my spine. I opened my mouth to call to James, but found I couldn’t speak. The noise had been made by the Australian himself moving past me. He spoke before I could.
“Hello!” he whispered. “Say, I’ll get a fever if I sleep in this mud. Let’s try that big tree.”
It was a giant of a tree. The lowest of its wide-spreading branches the Australian could reach from my shoulders. He pulled me up after him, and we climbed higher. I sat astride a great limb, tied my bundle above me, and, leaning against the trunk, sank into a doze.
I was awakened suddenly by a blow in the ribs.
“Quit it!” cried James angrily, thumping me again. “What are you tearing my clothes off for?”
I opened my mouth to tell him I was not doing anything of the kind, when I was interrupted by a noisy chattering in the branches above as a band of monkeys scampered away at the sound of our voices. They soon returned. For half the night those jabbering, clawing little brutes kept us awake, and ended by driving us from the tree. We spent the hours of darkness left on the ground at its foot, caring nothing for either snakes or tigers.
When daylight came we found the river again within a few hundred yards of our resting-place. A good hour afterward we stumbled, more asleep than awake, into a village on the northern bank. The place had a shop where food was sold. In it we made up for the supper we had gone without the night before.
Almost before we had finished eating we were in the center of a village fight. It was all the fault of the natives. We offered them money to row us across the river, but they turned scornfully away. When we stepped into one of the boats, made of dugout logs, that were drawn up on the bank, they charged down upon us. For a moment I thought we would end our wanderings in that very village.
In the thick of the fight a howling fellow, swinging a great knife, bounded suddenly into the boat. James caught him by an arm and a leg, and a glistening body flashed high in the air, gave one long-drawn shriek, and sank in the black water some distance behind us. When he came to the surface again he had lost his knife and we had pushed off from the shore.
“Beastly savages!” growled the Australian, catching up a paddle. “Serve ’em right if we kept their old hollow log and went down to Bangkok in her. What say we do?” he cried. “My feet are nothing but two blisters.”